Hi, 'Twas brillig, and Noel David Torres Ta?o at 09/12/10 09:35 did gyre and gimble: > I've a computer at home which uses to have two sessions opened at the same > time: mine and my wife's. We use to leave both sessions opened instead of > opening and closing sessions with each seat change. But the problem is that > the first openes session gets sound and the other one does not: it is > absolutely mute. This should not generally happen. PulseAudio is designed to work at a session level and ensure that when you switch between sessions, control of the audio device is handed gracefully over to the other user. All of this is actually handled at a lower level than PA. It's dealt with by a system called Console Kit. Console Kit maintains a record of who the "active" user is on a system (you can check via ck-list-sessions command in a terminal). Console Kit will instruct udev to write ACLs (access control lists) on various bits of hardware (including the sound card) so that only the active user has permission to use them at any one time (otherwise there could be security considerations - e.g. spying on voip calls etc. etc.) PA simply honours this lower level system. Now what is happening in your case is one of three things (the last is the most likely): 1. Console Kit is not working properly. To test this, open a session for both users and open a terminal and type ck-list-sessions. As you switch between the sessions, the "active" user should change. 2. Console Kit is not writing the ACLs properly. Use getfacl /dev/snd/* in each session to ensure that the relevant user appears in the ACLs for the sound. 3. One or both of your users is in the "audio" group. This bypasses all the nice ACL and session switching logic, but only really works if your sound hardware supports hardware mixing or you have specific reason to do something non-standard (see below). Just type "groups" in a terminal to see if you are in the audio group and if so, use the appropriate tools to remove this and then reboot (make sure you do this for both users) and you should get smooth switching of users. > How can we get session working in both sessions at the same time? Well that's the important question. Do you *really* want it to work at the same time, or do you want it to hand over gracefully when you switch sessions. Most systems (including OSX and Windows etc. - although I've had odd experience with Windows...) do the latter but some users want the former. If you fix/debug the above mentioned issues, then you'll get a nice handover, but if you really do want both at the same time output, then the simplest way (if you are generally always logged in) is as follows: 1. Add your user to the audio group, but not your wife. 2. Login as you. 3. Start paprefs and tick the "Enable Network Access" box. 4. Copy the file ~/.pulse-cookie to your wife's home directory (so that you both have the same cookie file). 5. Edit/create the file ~/.pulse/client.conf in your wife's home directory and put the line "default-server = localhost" This will mean you run the PA daemon and your wife connects to your daemon. You can also use a system-wide daemon but this is probably easier and at least means one user can benefit from SHM IPC whereas with system-wide no users can. HTHs Col -- Colin Guthrie gmane(at)colin.guthr.ie http://colin.guthr.ie/ Day Job: Tribalogic Limited [http://www.tribalogic.net/] Open Source: Mageia Contributor [http://www.mageia.org/] PulseAudio Hacker [http://www.pulseaudio.org/] Trac Hacker [http://trac.edgewall.org/]
